The present disclosure relates to a network device that processes packets.
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in the background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As part of packet processing operations, various network processors include multiple processing engines that each perform at least a part of a set of processing operations that need to be performed to process a packet received from a network. In general, packet contexts are used by the processing engines to ensure that a respective processing engine performs a next processing operation in a processing flow. Packet contexts include, for example, data such as a packet header, variables for processing the packet, a state of processing of the packet and other information about the packet being processed. Packet contexts typically accompany packets as they are passed to different processing stages in the network processor, and hold packet-specific data.